I'm Going Friggin' Nuts.

I've been playing Motorstorm: Pacific Rift here of late. It's a neat game, but it's driving me up the freakin' wall.

I'm a Motorstorm vet, having spent much time playing the first one (got it free with my 60 gig PS3). In the past, I avoided racing games, generally favoring other genres. But Motorstorm got me hooked on the franchise. Damn you, Evolution Studios!

Naturally, I picked up Pacific Rift. In some ways, it's better than the first. It's been challenging and fun. But now I've hit a speed bump on my path to off-road glory.

For a while, I've been doing the online thing with the game. It was mostly due to getting the top trophy, which requires you to win online trophies in addition to the single player awards. This is something I don't approve of and what many game developers are doing now. It puts those who don't care to game online, or can't for whatever reason, in a position where they are not getting their money's worth out of the game.

Anyway, after a few days of that, I decided to backtrack and pick up the remaining single player trophies. I'm working on the last two: Champion (all gold medals) and Hire Me (beat developer's ghosts in Time Attack, with every vehicle on every track).

This is where the problems have popped up.

The last Rank 8 race in the Earth Zone involves using a bike on a track called The Razorback. And no matter what route I take, or what kind of tactics I use, I can't manage any better than the occasional second place. I don't know what the hell I'm doing wrong. But it's driving me bonkers, which is why I haven't played in a couple of days.

The second major problem has been in Time Attack. More specifically, the Monster Truck run on the Wildfire track.

As I've mentioned before, I've been a Motorstorm player for a while. And I've played Pacific Rift enough to notice things that are out of the ordinary. And there is definitely something fishy here.

The developers "ghost" is moving a hell of a lot faster than I'm capable of, even if I follow the same path exactly. And jumping a hell of a lot farther on the ramps. To confirm my healthy sense of suspicion, I did a little test.

And sure enough, the only way I could run with the dev's ghost was to constantly use "boost". And the "ghost" vehicle had far greater boost endurance than the player vehicle. Far more than I've seen even with the AI in the game proper. Despite trying every route and using proper boost tactics, I can't beat the dev's ghost. I've come close once, but only by running in the red on the boost gauge half the damned time.

If I had to take a guess, the dev who did so during development ran the course earlier on in the process. The boost function was probably toned down later, but the course wasn't replayed for Time Attack.

What was strange was some of the times posted on the Time Attack rankings, which looked pretty fucking impossible, considering my experiences with this particular race. I later learned of a "boost exploit" used by players early on to get some pretty spectacular times. However, I didn't start running Time Attack courses until AFTER I downloaded the update/patch (which I had to do before playing online). Which causes all these 1:20 runs listed to make me scratch my head in wonder.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just missing something here. All I can do is just keep playing and find out.

And continue to be driven bonkers.